Cold and Pure and Very Dead (13 page)

S
ometimes when
I’m in the car on my way home from work,” Sophia told me over the puffed vegetable chips at Mai Thai, “I just want to keep on going, just get on the Interstate and press that pedal to the floor and
go
. Get
out
of here.
Never
come back. Then I pull into our driveway and get out of the car and open the door and see my mother hunkered in front of her soaps, and I know she’d never make it without me. It wouldn’t be a matter of … self-actualization … for her, it would be a question of whether or not she’d have food to put in her mouth—she’s that helpless. When my father … took care of things, I had no idea what kind of shape she was really in. She could make lunches, do the laundry, clean. She had the … the semblance of normality. But now that he’s … away …” She meant, in prison. “Forget it. As far as having anything to do with the outside world—she’d starve to death first.”

I reached over and took her hand. “That’s rough, Sophia.”

“I feel so trapped.” Her blue eyes were misty with incipient tears. “And I don’t think I can stand another day in this town. It’s just a big pity party. I’m
that poor, poor girl, that scholarship girl, that girl with the agoraphobic mother, that girl whose father
 … well, you know. They’re very nice to me at Bread & Roses, but, face it, it’s basically a minimum wage job, and that’s a
trap. I earn just enough to maintain the status quo—pay the rent and buy groceries, and—oh yes—keep the television working. I fiddle with my poems on the weekend, but lately even that … And, I’m sick of muffins! I can do more for the world
 … than … bake … muffins.”
With each of her final words she smacked the table hard with the flat of her hand. Then she looked down into her lap and whispered, “But that’s all life seems to hold in store for me.”

“Sweetie,” I said, “it’s not that bad.” Amanda had hinted that things weren’t going well for her friend, but I’d had no idea that Sophia was this deeply depressed. After her father’s arrest, she’d attended classes parttime, and had finished her B.A. over a year ago. Since then she hadn’t made any career moves. I’d been surprised at that. Even staying in Enfield to care for her mother, Sophia could have found a job with a better future than baking at Bread & Roses offered her. But every time I’d broached the subject—how about teaching school? how about a job at the college?—she’d shied away. Now I thought I understood why; she was desperate to get away from Enfield.

Just then the waitress brought our meals, shrimp for me and Pad Thai for Sophia. Whenever I took her out to eat, Sophia ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. “That looks yummy,” I said, and forked up a clump of her rice noodles. “Can I trade you some shrimp for an oodle of these?” Against her protest, I laid three jumbo shrimp on her plate. She burst out sobbing; evidently I’d just joined the pity party.

I waited out her tears, then asked, “Did I ever tell you about … about when Amanda was a baby?” I knew I hadn’t; I didn’t talk to anyone about that grim period of my life. But maybe it would help Sophia to hear the Great Karen Pelletier Saga. Maybe it would
even help
me
to tell it. So, as we ate, I recounted the tale of my star-crossed youth—the high-school pregnancy, the renounced college scholarship, the abusive marriage. “And then, when I had to get Amanda out of that house, I asked my father if I could come home. He freaked out. Not only did he refuse to take us in, he forbade my mother and sisters to help us. Sophia, I had a high-school diploma, nothing else—no contacts, no references, no work experience. I made it on my own—with a little help from a few kind people and a few farsighted educational programs. Oh, yeah, sweetie, I was a scholarship girl like you—all the way through. I know how pity feels. But I also knew what kind of life I wanted for myself and my daughter: books, music, ideas
—choices
. I could have stayed there in North Adams, waitressing for the rest of my life and bemoaning my miserable lot, but I’d be
damned
if I was going to be
cheated like that.”
I slammed my fist on the table three times, then grinned shamefacedly at my companion:
The anger never really goes away, does it?
“And, now, I’m here at Enfield and Amanda’s at Georgetown. We did it. So can you.”

“Amanda is
so
lucky.” She was looking at me reverently, as if I were the second coming of Mother Teresa.

“That’s
not
the point, sweetie. The point is that you
can
get out of the box.
You
, Sophia Elisabeta Warzek, can get out of the box. Now we just have to figure out
how.”
I pushed my plate away, signaled to the waitress, then asked Sophia, “Tell me, in an ideal world, what would you want to do now?”

“Maybe grad school—an M.F.A. in poetry. Maybe a publishing job in Manhattan. But I can’t, Karen—I can’t leave my mother.”

I hesitated before I ventured my next thought.
“There are programs for people like her. Assisted-living types of arrangements.”

She flinched.

“Think about it,” I said gently, and turned to the waitress. “Coconut ice cream, please. Anything for you, Sophia? No? Make that
two
coconut ice creams.”

A
fter dinner
, we hustled over to Smith’s Bookshop for Jake Fenton’s reading and book signing. The streets were slick with rain, and the bookstore lights spilled onto the sidewalk like luminous yellow paint. Sophia and I shared a large red umbrella, tipped against the wind-slanted rain. Blindly entering the narrow doorway, I collided with a tall, slender figure, snapped the umbrella shut, and smiled apologetically at a man with gold-rimmed glasses and a gray ponytail. “Sorry.” I leaned the closed umbrella against the wall in the tiled entrance to drip with the others.

“My fault, entirely,” he replied, bowing slightly, in the continental manner. With a gallant flourish of the arm, he stepped back and ushered Sophia and me through the door. We detoured around a double stack of
Oblivion Falls
paperbacks by the front counter and into the main section of the store.

The event was a sellout, drawing the full range of Jake’s audience, from the intelligentsia to the rugged, out-doorsy, shit-in-the-woods crowd. Book signings usually feature bulk cookies and jug wine, but tonight Smith’s Bookshop had gone all out. For this momentous event, Whit Meyers had laid out
meat:
roast beef, corned beef, and liverwurst sandwiches cut in bulky quarters, accompanied by thick, ridged, hand-cut potato chips, and a blood-red bordeaux. If cigars and brandy hadn’t
been so prohibitively expensive, we would have been puffing and sipping ourselves into a fine masculine fug.

The bookstore chairs, grouped in a small semicircle in front of the lectern, were already occupied when Sophia and I arrived, and people were beginning to jam the narrow aisles between the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Interspersed among the guys in the plaid flannel shirts, were a few students and a number of my colleagues: Miles Jewell, leonine as usual, with his tweeds and mop of shaggy white hair; Sally Chenille and Joe Gagliardi, the downtown twins, with their multiple tattoos and piercings; George Gilman in old khakis and a baggy brown sweater, gazing yearningly across the room to where Jill sat with Kenny; Greg, who’d managed to tear himself away from his babies for the evening. Ralph Brooke, in a black beret and navy-blue raincoat with epaulets, leaned against the counter, as far away as he could get from the main event and still see what was going on through his thick-lensed glasses. Even Avery Mitchell, our president, he of the elegant bones and smooth lines, slipped in at the last minute.

As Sophia and I found a nook, in the New Age and Spirituality section, that offered a partial view of the author, Harriet Person sidled up to me and muttered in my ear. “Karen, I’m distressed to see that you haven’t taken my advice to stay away from Jake Fenton. You’d be much better off if you did.” I gave her a straight look—
bitch!
—then turned my attention pointedly to the main event. She sidled away again.

Jake, clad tonight in the universal male book-signing costume, sweater and jeans in monochromatic black, was off in a corner, engaged in an intense, low-voiced discussion with the man I’d crashed into in the doorway. The newcomer was an intriguing guy; round, gold-rimmed glasses lent a scholarly air to a slender face featuring high
cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a strong straight nose. And then there was that iron-gray ponytail.

The two men didn’t quite
glare
at each other, but if the brute unflinchingness of their eye contact was any measure, they were not the best of pals. Even in such an ultracivilized setting as this college-town bookstore, there was something primal about this scene. A confrontation between two males in the heat of life, I mused—but then, I’ve always been a bit fanciful as far as a certain type of manly man is concerned. When Whit stepped up to the lectern to introduce the author, the conversation between the two men terminated with what looked like a muttered imprecation from Monsieur Ponytail. The latter stalked down the book-laden aisle, his facial muscles revealing a struggle to contain anger, brushed past me, and slammed out of the store just as Jake began to read.

A
nd thus
we walked in the woods’ ”—Jake wound up the selection from
Endurance
—“ ‘and it would not be wrong to say that thence forward the woods walked in us, its brute knowledge stalking through our veins with every spasm of our too-young-wounded hearts.’ ”

The applause was enthusiastic. In the question-and-answer period that followed the reading, Sally Chenille was the first to raise her hand. A nationally known, even notorious, theorist of literature and sexuality, Sally fancied herself a celebrity, even though her brief flurry of talk-show appearances had died down. She had chosen the slim black tunic she wore over ebony tights to enhance her media-friendly, skeletal frame. Her gaunt features were embellished as usual with an application of woundlike makeup. Leaning against a tall shelf, she
gestured languidly with her plastic wineglass. “Mr. Fenton,” she asked, “would you postulate that the semiotic field of masculine entextualization is inseminated with a fetishized phallic signification?”

“Excuse me?” Jake gripped the black metal lectern with both hands and leaned forward with an exaggerated attentiveness, as if anxious not to miss one iota of her meaning.

Sally ran a beringed hand over her bruise-colored brush cut. “Let me put it in layman’s terms, Mr. Fenton. Since the mechanisms of masculine sexual desire exert themselves through assumedly preideological bodily drives, and given the common linguistic etiology of the words
pen
and
penis
from the Latin
penna
, or feather, does it not therefore stand to reason that penile engorgement and the act of taking up the pen to write derive from a common physiological impulse—”

Jake glanced around at his admirers with a
would-you-believe-this?
expression. “Lady,” he queried, playing to the gallery, “are you asking me if I write with my balls?”

Sally, oblivious to nuances and titillated by this plain speaking, flashed a vermillion-lipsticked smile. “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite so
bal
dly.” She paused to grin at what she obviously considered a clever pun. “But, yes, in essence, that’s what I’m asking.”

Jake pulled his earlobe. “That’s what I
thought
you were asking.” He looked out over her head at the gathered audience. “Next question, please?”

Guffaws from the audience clued Sally in to the fact that she’d been had. Her self-satisfied expression evaporated; her face went blank. Until just this very moment, I would not have been able to imagine a situation in which I could feel sympathy for someone as obtuse as Sally Chenille.

“Questions?” Jake asked again. After his response to Sally, he had no immediate takers.

Then Miles, with as macho a swagger as possible for a man of sedentary lifestyle fast leaving seventy in his dust, rose from his chair. “Jake, my friend, your own work excepted, don’t you find that the past two or three decades have seen the waning of
virility
in American literature …?”

I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Jake Fenton’s reply.